Posted tagged ‘The Chicago Conspiracy’

A recent wave of occupations has been spreading across North America, starting in New York and moving all the way to California and Canada. We will be having a discussion about these events, the logic behind them, and the generalization of the form, including the plausibility of imposing this modality on different localities (the discussion is happening in a squat after all!).

Suggested Reading:

Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation (Anonymous)
The New School Occupation (Anonymous)
University Occupations: France 1968, Greece 2006, NYC 2008-9
20 Theses on the Subversion of the Metropolis (Plan B Bureau)
Nanterre, Here, Now (Lyotard)

And at 7:30 PM we are having a film screening of The Chicago Conspiracy

This Spring 2010, a member of Subversive Action Films, the collective that produced the documentary film The Chicago Conspiracy, will be touring the Midwest. The film springs from the student and social movements of post-dictatorship Chile. The collective is excited to share the film with engaged audiences in our area and spark discussions within local movements. In tandem with the film, we are also setting up a photo exhibit of social struggle in Chile.

The Chicago Conspiracy traces the intertwining paths of diverse social movements in Chile—from the students on occupied campuses fighting education privatization, to the history of politically active barrios on the margins of Santiago, to the Mapuche, an indigenous people who, since the arrival of the Spanish, have never ceased resisting the expropriation of their land. Pinochet’s dictatorship from 1973-1990, supported by the US government and economically planned by former students of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, provides the backdrop. The film includes powerful interviews with a family who lost three children to the military dictatorship. On March 29, 1985, the first two brothers to be killed, Rafael and Eduardo Vergara, were gunned down by the military dictatorship in a politically active barrio. The anniversary of their murder is now always marked by national protests called the Day of the Youth Combatant, in their memory and to commemorate all the youth killed under the military dictatorship and the current democracy.